my heart goes out to those in new orleans. i hope this won’t be another katrina. i saw the damage left by katrina and it was amazing yet depressing. i hope our government can pull through for them this time.

waking up today wasn’t as painful as yesterday. perhaps the four star treatment soothed my tiredness. the breakfast at daniela’s was the best so far. in addition to the usual fare, they also had crab tempura. weird breakfast food. course, i tried it. nothing special.

today we would be on a guided tour of kaunas, have free time to explore, head to trakai (pronounced trah-ki; ki as in kite) castle, and then into vilnius with plenty of time to explore the capital.

we loaded up into the bus, luggage and all, and drove to the start point of the tour, kaunas castle. much to my surprise, the tour guide for the kaunas tour was already on the bus and began talking about kaunas over the speaker system.
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ugh. the 7:00am wake up came way too early, although on the positive, there was a dramatic sunrise with lots of clouds. i was so lethargic that i am surprised i was able to shower, pack, eat breakfast and get on the bus before falling asleep again.

today was exploring an area called the curonian spit national park, another unesco world heritage site for being a cultural landscape. the spit is a forested sand dune that stretches from lithuania to the tiny piece of russia on the coast of the baltic sea and creates the curonian lagoon. after exploring several parts of the spit, we would drive to kaunas, lithuania’s second biggest city.

to travel onto the spit, our bus boarded a car ferry that took us a very short distance across the water. along the waterfront was the shipping docks and massive cargo ships. the weather was playing in our favor; still a strong wind, but the sun was breaking through the clouds and we could see the blue skies behind them.
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for the rest of the trip, our mode of transportation is a private touring bus. this enables us to explore the countries in more depth and visit places unreachable via public transportation. we have a private driver named griss or something like that. last name bear … grizzly bear. ba-dum. he is a fine driver. helpful with the luggage. poor guy waits for us everywhere we visit and whiles away the time by playing suduko.

we woke up early to get started on a full day of visiting different sites in Latvia and Lithuania. i didn’t sleep very well all night. had some crazy dreams. that often happens when i am sleeping away from my bed. all i know is that my sister should watch out for the dragon. i also got the crazy idea to get my family’s coat of arms tattooed on my shoulder. guess my mind is playing with the medieval scenery. my family coat of arms is three beer bottles at a diagonal on one side and the other side is a bottle opener.
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today was the second and last day in riga. no tour schedule and we were free to do what we wanted to do. we decided to modify a walking tour offered by the guide book to incorporate some of the other sights we missed on the tour yesterday. in the evening, we would check off the list a latvian dinner and sampling black magic, the local strange liquor.

since nothing was scheduled, we slept in a bit and woke up just in time to grab breakfast at the hotel. it wasn’t raining but the cloud cover suggested it might later.

we made our way over to the swedish gate, which is a gate built in the 17th century and is the only gate remaining of the old city wall. the picture of the gate, featured on the right, is in most guide books and postcards.
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maybe the jet lag made waking up at 4:45am easy although i would think i have acclimated to the time zone already, but whatever it was, waking up wasn’t very difficult.  we were up so early that we were able to watch some of the democratic convention live from the states.  the hotel provided breakfast and then the taxi took us to the bus station in tartu.  we boarded a greyhound-esque bus and began the 4.5 hour ride to riga in latvia. 

what was difficult was trying to stay awake on the bus.  the 4:45am wake up was hitting me, and as i forced myself to write about tartu, i fell asleep and quickly woke up to see that i had fallen asleep while pressing the hyphen key. i had a long line of dashes.  good thing i didn’t press the backspace

key.  the ride through the countryside was just about the same as the trek from tallinn to tartu except the bus made stops in quaint towns along the way so it was interesting to see the small towns with the big old world churches. 

we arrived in riga around 11am next to the central market.  the central market is hard to miss because it is five huge zepplin hangars.  no time to explore yet as another small bus was taking us to the hotel irina, which wasn’t very far away, but the ride seemed really long. 
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oh, it was tough waking up this morning at 7am.  i could have slept another few hours, but we had to get up to grab breakfast and head to the bus station.  our next stop in the tour was tartu where the largest and oldest university (ulikooli in estonian) is located.  tartu is also considered the spiritual part of estonia.  many of the events important to the national awakening occurred in tartu, such as the creation of the flag, the first Estonian song festival and the first Estonian language newspaper.
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the good weather ran out. we woke up to rain, wind and low 60s. a tour of old town was scheduled for the morning and then we had the rest of the afternoon to do whatever.

we met the group and tour guide in the lobby of the hotel. the tour guide was a nice old lady who spoke very good english. we meandered through the cobblestone streets and went in various places to have a look around. prior to the trip, i had read the information about the various places in the guide book, but i hadn’t taken the time to locate them in the town. now that the guide was pointing out the places, i realized i had walked right by them the day before.
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leaving helsinki was easy, physically and mentally. physically, the boat ride lasted about an hour and a half. it had a bar, restaurant, deck, and the seating resembled an airplane. i found a seat next to a window and wrote the entire time. mentally, don’t get me wrong, i thoroughly enjoyed helsinki. it was a very beautiful town, safe, super easy to navigate and get around, and the people were very friendly. however, the one thing that helsinki was missing was the medieval setting that awaited in tallinn.
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after suomenlinna, we wandered through the market square

and i bought a shot glass to add to my collection. we also walked over to the superseacat to buy our ticket to tallinn, which was 30 euros.

by this time, i was starving and would have eaten anything. we decided to head back to the roobert street to eat and sit on the sidewalk street with free wi-fi at the dtm bar. the dtm bar was having a dancing diva night with some drag queen hosting the event. while we were sitting there, they had scaffolding outside the entrance holding up a platform where they would dance and greet the crowd.
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